looking for Milena

After watching the amazing new Kafka movie in November, I started reading his letters to Milena Jesenská in the old paperback edition that has been in the family since August 1966. (I can actually remember seeing it on my parents' bookshelves as child.) I stopped reading half-way in, however, when a glance at the afterword informed me that the editor had left out lots of material for fear of offending people who were still alive at the time of publication. I understand that more recent editions are more comprehensive, and have also reconsidered the chronology which is a bit of a challenge. So I'll look out for one of those to read instead.

The situation is similar for the biography of Milena and the anthology of her work that I read a couple of years ago (but forgot to review). Both have now been bettered by the efforts of Alena Wagnerová who wrote a new biography and edited a new compilation of the journalistic work as well as one with Milena's letters to other people (those to Kafka are lost). All three are in Czech originally and have been translated to German, but apparently not into English according to the references list in the Wikipedia entry.

I'll look out for all of these books, but in the meantime here's my (now somewhat antiquarian) collection of earlier Milena-related sources:

When I was looking for other Kafka-related movies, I also discovered one about Milena which I had never heard of before:

Milena by Véra Belmont, starring Valérie Kapriskie in the title role. This dates from 1990 so may not exist on DVD?

refugees in the family

In my Every Picture series, we met Luise Faust from the East Prussian patchwork family as a young woman in 1925 and then later in life meeting up with her sisters Auguste and Hanna in Luise's garden at Lippstadt. We didn't know anything about her life other than that she had a husband and three children.

Looking up an address book of Lippstadt from 1951, we now found out that we had Luise's married name wrong, it was Hieske (not Hießke). The addressbook lists her husband Adolf Hieske as a pensioner.

With this additional information, some googling revealed that the Hieske family did not move westwards in the 1920s like the other two sisters did. They stayed in East Prussia and had to flee from there at the end of the war, which is why we find them in a refugee camp in Copenhagen in 1946. This lovely handwritten list notes that their son, Herbert Otto Hieske was born 15.4.1932 in Klein-Nuhr, Kr. Wehlau, Ostpreussen, baptised at an unknown date in the same place, and received confirmation 10.11.1946 in the refugee camp. There is a whole database of names of refugees in Denmark here.

Reading up on the little-known history of these refugee camps (eg here), we found out that at the time of Germany's capitulation there were some 250,000 refugees (plus 300,000 soldiers) in Denmark. The Allies allowed the soldiers to return to Germany but not the refugees - they were detained in camps and many of them remained stuck for several years, with the last ones returning in February 1949.

From 1946, the British Occupation Zone in Germany allowed refugees from Denmark in if they had family members livingin the zone already, which was the case for Luise (as both her sisters lived in Duisburg-Hamborn, having migrated westwards in the 1920s). Still, it appears she and her son (and possibly her husband too) were still in Denmark in November 1946. According to her nephew, Luise also had another son and a daughter, but we know nothing else about them.

I think we don't have any other photos of Luise apart from the three I've already used in the blog entries linked above, but I've made a new edit of the portrait of young Luise, improving the contrast and the crop:

30 years of climate failure

I get a bit of an anger management problem around the time of year when another COP climate summit confirms that humanity has spent another year not doing anything to stop the climate catastrophe. Even worse when it's a round number, like this year's COP30 marking three decades of failure to even stop emissions from rising, never mind reducing them. I think my first COP-related article was this one on the preparations for COP15 in Copenhagen (2009). We still had hope back then.

By way of therapy, I channel that anger into a vaguely climate-related feature. This year's climate-rage writeup is about the Lancet climate report on the health impacts of the climate catastrophe. Obviously depressing, but then again it is also refreshing that the Lancet authors name the acute dangers we're facing loud and clear whereas the normal media coverage has all but given up on this emergency.

So, well, I've calmed down and my feature is out now:

An unhealthy climate

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 23, 1 December 2025, Pages R1127-R1129

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The city of Belém, shown in this satellite view, is surrounded by Amazonian rainforest. (Photo: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE (CC BY-SA 2.0).)